Make geomodelling grAIt again?
Not too long ago, reservoir modelling came at a time when the industry was relying on super capable draftsmen/women who could literally translate the mind of geologist into paper. Resources…
Geology & Geophysics
How new seismic and old core have shed new light on the Zechstein play along the Mid North Sea High
As part of the Aberdeen Energy Talk series, PhD student Thomas Houghton from Aberdeen University discusses his work on the Mid North Sea High area of the UK offshore. Using…
The structural risk of vertically exaggerated cross-sections
It is quite common for seismic lines to be displayed with high degrees of vertical exaggeration. However, vertically exaggerated sections can skew the true geometry of a basin and provide…
Devonian reefs – Canada
The Early to Middle Devonian was a period of global evolution of carbonate coral and stromatoporoid reef builders. Many carbonate build-ups of that age are observed around the world in…
Is there a coal exploration industry?
If oil and gas are dirty words when talking about energy, it is even more dangerous to mention the c*** word. However, despite the rapidly rising share of renewables in…
How to identify fluid migration with 1D models and temperature data
One revealing experience occurred while I was working in a basin offshore Thailand. I only had temperature data from several wells. Once a 1D model was built for each of…
Northern North Sea: A decade of seismic acquisition and exploration success
Figure 1. Discoveries within the NVG surveys from 2018 – 2024. Source: Viridien. In this article, we go back more than ten years to 2013, when the area west and…
A mystery
The upper Permian Zechstein of the UK Southern North Sea is experiencing a little revival these days. The main reason is that gas and some oil were discovered last year…
Mining a “source rock” for the battery industry
It is too easy to think that oil and gas is at one end of the energy spectrum, and renewables at the other. In fact, when digging a bit deeper,…
The exposed Interior Seaway – Just layer cake geology?
If anything, long and continuous outcrops often suggest that geology is much more varied in a vertical than in a horizontal direction. This beautiful photo from the Bisti Badlands in…
Death by 0.9
During an evening lecture organized by the Geoscience Energy Society of Great Britain (GESGB) in Aberdeen the other day, a discussion unfolded about how to risk play elements in a…
Less is more – uncertainty in rock properties
My last article opened a topic of uncertainty in basin models. Discussion following its publication brought up an interesting research paper describing how increasing model complexity increases uncertainty in its…